Chapter 26: Chapter #25 | Alarming Failure
Notes:
Hey everyone! Sorry about the delay before this chapter. I had intended to give you guys a double chapter for Halloween but my proofreader convinced me that it would be a bad idea. People would miss one chapter or get confused etc.
But here we are and we're back to the main story! Enjoy!
Chapter Text
"I, I'm wh-what?" Ochako couldn't help but stutter out a half response. There were a number of things that could have come from the pair, especially after Izuku's offer to Hagakure, but she hadn't expected to be insulted within the first sentence.
Izuku sighed, because, of course, the first thing out of Hatsume's mouth had been utterly blunt to the point of degrading. Taking his left hand off his face and carefully placing his right arm behind him, Izuku gestured to hold back the string of retorts that were brewing in Uraraka's eyes. "What she meant is that we noticed some discrepancies in your quirk usage versus how you described it to us. If you don't mind me asking, what exactly does your quirk do? In your doctor's words, please, if you can remember all the way back to your examination when your quirk manifested."
Uraraka tilted her head and scrunched up her eyebrows, arms crossing in front of her. "Uhm, well. I can't really remember the examination. That was years ago, you know? But I do remember I didn't spend a whole lot of time there. There were a whole lot of people, and I remember it because I remember thinking that it felt like we got rushed through. I didn't really think much of it at the time. I was too excited to try out my quirk, after all. I think they said something about me altering the gravity of what I touch with my finger pads, thus making them weightless."
Uraraka held her hands up, making grabby motions towards the two as Izuku grumbled and rubbed his left temple. "Of course they did. My own quirk specialist determined my quirklessness with an x-ray, rather than a blood test, but I had hoped they all weren't that inept. Considering how bad the HPSC is, I shouldn't be surprised. But fuck, this is on another level entirely."
Uraraka couldn't help but be startled by the sudden hostility. "What does the Hero Commission have to do with this?"
"Besides the fact that they're a bunch of corrupt, quirkist assholes?!" Mei snarled the words out before Izuku shot her a look and a low warning with her name.
"Please forgive her. We've had some, well, negative experiences in the past with the Hero Commission. It isn't anything you need to worry about. But to answer your question, most people assume that quirk specialists are employed through the government. Which, I suppose, is true to some extent. But most of them are employed through the HPSC, rather than running their own practices. It's one of the ways that they track quirks, but again, besides the point."
Izuku took several steps to the side and pulled what appeared to be a small metal cube from the rolling cart Mei had brought with her, while Mei herself opened her laptop at the end and began to boot the software she'd need. He continued as he rolled the cube around in his hands, as if it were a child's plaything.
"Since Mei has already been blunt, I'll go ahead and continue that trend. What that doctor told you is likely either complete bullshit or not even remotely the full story. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces in the universe. The weakest of the four forces, but a fundamental force all the same. If a body has mass, then it is going to have gravity. The force attraction between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of the masses, of course, and-"
"Midoriya, you're going to lose her if you keep babbling science at her." Mei couldn't help but interject, worrying that Uraraka would be zoning out by now, but the girl seemed rather attentive.
"Is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, right?" Both of the CEOs quirked their eyebrows at her, and she shrugged. "I ended up studying the subject a bit, trying to improve my quirk, and it always confused me how I could just nullify gravity, but since I didn't really have the money to get any tests done…"
"Right. Well, it's your lucky day then." Izuku tossed the steel cube to Uraraka, who caught it, nearly dropping it from the sudden weight. "Use your quirk on that. Are we ready to go, Mei?" Mei nodded, and Izuku gestured to go ahead.
Shrugging, Uraraka used her quirk on the cube and let it float in front of her. She waited nervously for a few seconds. Then a few seconds more. She had been getting steadily more nervous as they'd been talking. If they were right, then she had been completely wrong about her quirk and that, well, that wasn't a pleasant feeling in her gut.
That feeling only made itself further apparent when Mei's eyebrows shot up and she snorted. She gestured for Izuku to take a look at the screen, and after a moment of concentrated reading, he shook his head and grabbed what looked like several small pads and a plate from the cart. He planted the plate on the ground and walked up to her, signaling her to deactivate her quirk, and began placing the sensors on her. "Once more while standing on the pressure plate, please."
It took all of ten seconds following the reactivation of her quirk for Midoriya to start cursing again, before he began leading her through a series of tests and exercises from moving the cube around in the air to simply letting it float along. One moment she'd be working with one cube, then juggling another three or four. Each step of the way, Midoriya seemed to become more agitated and Hatsume more straight-faced.
"Wow, the doctor wasn't just wrong. He was a fucking idiot." Uraraka was still attempting to fully reconcile the extremely timid Iwasaki Hiroki with Midoriya, so this reaction was jarring. "You aren't negating gravity at all. You are doing something equally stupid that I have no explanation for right now, but it isn't gravity-related."
"Uhm, what exactly am I doing then?" Uraraka deactivated her quirk for what was hopefully the final time, while Mei approached her to collect the equipment. Mei was staring at her, completely deadpan, and while Uraraka didn't know it, Hatsume was doing her best to not expose the girl in front of her to another rant about the incompetence of the current system.
"What you are doing is in two parts. First off, you are directly affecting the momentum of an item. I tap the cube to the right, and it starts going right. I then tap the cube left, and it starts going left without anything more than a tap, regardless of how fast it was going, its mass, anything at all. The second thing you're doing is moving mass around while your quirk is active."
"W-wait, if that was the case, how are things floating?"
"Because your quirk is evidently doing the heavy lifting right now. If I had to guess, and this would need more testing to be sure of, your mental image is it floating. Your quirk is picking up on that and reflecting it externally. To be exact, let's take the first test as an example. The cube was 'floating' there, correct? That isn't exactly true. There was a constant 9.807 m/s² pressure on it from below it. Your quirk was quite literally matching gravity vertically in order to make the cube float there."
Midoriya had taken to pacing now in his frustration while gesturing with his left hand as Hatsume carefully placed equipment onto her cart. "The second part of this is that you perceive things that float as lighter, which is perfectly reasonable, but it causes you to miss the second part. When you activated your quirk, a large amount of the mass from the steel cube moved from the cube into you. It's not telekinesis, though it is similar, but you theoretically don't have to worry about an object's inertia. You are also able to theoretically shift mass around at will, and that just shouldn't be possible. Objects that have large amounts of mass and can be moved with little force shouldn't exist. If you combine those two abilities, it means that you have-"
"Izuku!" Midoriya had steadily been getting faster in both his pacing and muttering when Hatsume called his name, snapping him out of his spiral. "C'mon, you're going to confuse her if you don't tell her clearly."
"Yeah, yeah, you're right." Izuku turned back to Uraraka, who had just been watching what looked like a nosedive into insanity with a wary expression. "Sorry about that, but the implications of this are startling, to say the least. You appear to have the ability to manipulate both mass and momentum while disregarding inertia, and I have absolutely no idea how that is possible."
…
"Are none of us going to bring up how damn unsettling Midoriya is? Or how absolutely fucked up it is that he simulated killing us for god's sake?!"
The exhausted class had barely trickled back into their dorms and begun heading their separate ways when Sero decided to speak up. Though it surprised no one when Todoroki continued towards his room or Bakugo did the same after telling them to fuck themselves, a large quantity of the class were paying attention to Sero with concerned expressions.
"Right? Even if Aizawa Sensei asked him to do it, wasn't that too much?" Kaminari couldn't help but rub his neck as he muttered agreements with Sero. Ashido, on the other hand, bounced in place besides Hagakure, feeling mildly indignant.
"That's hardly fair to him, isn't it? We'd do the same thing if our professor asked us to, and Iwa- Midoriya isn't even here to defend himself."
"He even offered to help me, despite not having to.." Toru's response was softer, but had an impact all the same.
"But how are we supposed to trust him now? He's already deceived us once. What if this is just another trick? What else does he plan on doing to us?!" Kaminari jumped at Midoriya's offer to help Hagakure, and even Iida seemed like he was nodding his head along.
"I don't want to say that U.A. made a mistake, but how are we supposed to trust Aizawa Sensei and Midoriya if they open the semester by lying to us?" Iida's robotic chopping was evidently the last straw for Toga, because she bared her teeth and started growling at the three who were speaking against Midoriya.
"I think that it's kind of manly! Look at how easily he was able to do it. He'll be our classmate, after all. Think about how much we can learn from him!" Kirishima was doing his best to defuse the situation with his sharp smile and happy-go-lucky attitude, but was being met with limited success.
"That's enough." Jiro sighed. She'd had enough of this, and as she snapped out an order for silence, everyone turned to her, while Toga grumbled and stepped away from Sero, who she appeared to be ready to strangle with his own tape. "First off, Himiko has a point. Izuku isn't here to defend himself, so do try to have a little bit of decorum. It is the first day of class, and except for a handful of us, none of you have had any actual interactions with Izuku to base these accusations off of. That being said, behave yourself, Himi. Izuku wouldn't approve of you throttling Sero. If you have questions or accusations to make, point them at him. I'm sure he'll be happy to deal with them."
"Of course Midoriya's guard dogs would defend him. They probably knew it was him the entire time." Sero muttered it just loudly enough that Toga, without Jiro's enhanced hearing, could hear him. The only thing that kept Toga off of him was Jiro wrapping her earjacks around Toga's arm while her hand was placed on her shoulder.
"C'mon man, that was a little far, don't you think?" Kaminari took a step away from Sero with that comment, if only to distance himself from Toga in case she got loose. She looks piiiissssed.
"What? You think nobody noticed how he talked to you back at the training field? Or that you only had a couple nonlethal marks on you? You two clearly know him."
"You're right, Sero. We did know the entire time, because he trained us to notice these things. We also weren't the only two to pass, as Todoroki did, as well, but if that is the only thing that you took away from this, then you truly did fail." Jiro had remained rather placidly calm throughout all of this, or had at least done her best to appear as such, but her tone chilled when she finished her sentence.
"It's like Aizawa Sensei said. This is our baseline. What Izuku did was to show you where your baseline was. Breakfast could have had any number of things in it. Botulinum, ricin, tetrodotoxin, cyanide, strychnine. He cheated through his games with you, and none of you noticed. He cut everyone into simulated ribbons in a hope that you would learn an important lesson early. This is not a safe field of work. Every day, we could get targeted. Every day, we could get injured or killed." Jiro couldn't help but touch the scar trailing down the right side of her lips as she thought about how dangerous it could be, even with training. "We have to be vigilant, or else everything we've worked for could come crashing down."
"You didn't answer the question, though, kero. How are we supposed to trust him?"
Jiro couldn't help a sad, rueful smile now, because she knew that he'd have to earn that. "I'm not asking you to trust him. I'm asking you to tolerate him until you can."
...
It wasn't long before Uraraka was walking back to the changing room, both bewildered and feeling a bit of trepidation. Midoriya and Hatsume could understand that well as they watched her walk away. Her quirk wasn't what she thought it was at all, and that would take a bit to adapt to.
The moment Uraraka had stepped out of both visual and audible range, Hatsume turned towards Izuku. "So, you're going through with your plan after all?"
Izuku frowned but nodded. "We're going to need allies that think as we do. Vigilantes and favors are only going to do so much."
"You could have told her about my experience with quirk specialists, then, or about the trouble the HPSC has given us." Hatsume had her own opinions regarding Izuku's plan, but in the end, he was her partner. If this is how he wanted to do things, then she would stand by the decision. She didn't particularly have any kind of stake in hero students, anyway.
Izuku just shook his head. "My reveal, my quirk tests and Aizawa's gambit in general, her own quirk revelations. Any more and she wouldn't be able to process it. I'll drip feed her information later, once she's acclimatized a bit better."
Hatsume narrowed her eyes, but with this kind of thing, he knew best. She was more than happy to drop it, because he'd also brought up another point. Stepping quickly and closing the distance between them, she smacked her hand against his right arm, which he'd had tucked behind his back the entire time.
The rapid dilation of his eyes and the scream he trapped in his throat told her everything she needed. "You overdid it again. How bad?"
Midoriya hissed curses between his teeth as he glared at her. "Yes, obviously I overdid it. Thank you, captain obvious. Did you have to smack my arm?"
"How. Bad."
"Bakugo pissed me off, and I threw the damn ball to Hawaii."
"I didn't ask what you did, I asked how badly you hurt yourself."
Tsk. "Fine. Shredded every muscle and practically atomized the bones. I'm only moving it through the augments, and even that is fairly limited. It also hurts like all hell, so don't fucking hit it."
Hatsume closed her eyes, took a deep breath, released it, and hit his arm again. "You dumbass. How many times do I have to tell you to stop overdoing it? Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. You might be barely human, and you might also have more mechanical augmentation than is healthy, but that doesn't mean your body can keep up with it. Phoenix, how long is it going to take to fix?"
Izuku's natural healing, in conjunction with the nanobots in his bloodstream, should have his body repaired early tomorrow morning, though it will take considerable materials to do so. He should take at least one round of standard GDS-5 before he sleeps, lest he experience symptoms of deficiencies.
Izuku grunted out a thank you before turning to Hatsume. "Shall we go get the supplement and prepare the testing equipment for Uraraka's quirk, or shall we stand here and smack my arm some more."
"Fine. FINE." Hatsume threw her hands in the air in a sign of defeat and exasperation. "One of these days, you're going to learn your lesson, but evidently that isn't today." Izuku smiled. She knew him all too well.
…
It had taken longer than Midoriya would have liked to get Nedzu's permission to use one of the gyms for testing. Oh, not because the damned chimera didn't want him using the facility to aid his classmates, quite the opposite. The confounded rat-wolf hybrid had wanted to know all about this new development in his classmate's quirk.
By the time Izuku entered through the front doors of the dorms, he was exhausted and his arm ached, despite the painkillers Hatsume had insisted on with the general deficiency supplement. He'd fought her on that initially, but right about now, as he was wearing down, he was really damn thankful for them.
Dealing with Nedzu was always taxing. Where most groups had a distinctive goal and objectives to go with, the president wasn't like that. He was a web of plans, contingency plans, and contingency plans to the contingency plans. Navigating conversations with him was a war of wits and ideologies, and although they fought with different weapons, it was probably the reason the two had a begrudging admiration for one another, bordering on something akin to friendship.
There were only a few of his classmates in the common area now. The sun was going down, and most of the students had trickled off to bed. Not that he could blame them. Aizawa had pushed them to their limits, and he'd be surprised if they weren't exhausted.
Izuku stood behind the couch for a minute, just taking in the relaxed nature of his classmates. It was a breath of fresh air after his day. Shinso was in the corner, nursing a cup of coffee, while Yaoyorozu studied something across from him. What she was studying was beyond him, as classes hadn't even begun. But he of all people wasn't going to criticize her for learning something new.
He chuckled at Mina, once again taking Kaminari's money when he landed on the boardwalk space. She was disturbingly good at games that have an element of luck to them. All heads whipped around and found him standing in the room, their expressions ranging from shock to displeasure, but the most concerning was the anger and fear coming from Sero's glare. To my recollection, I haven't done anything to him. Phoenix, did something happen while I was out?
There was a fight amongst a part of the class regarding whether you could be trusted, considering your rather violent introduction.
I see. Any threat?
No, I don't believe the hostile elements will make any move against you or yours at this time.
Roger, keep me apprised. I'll let them sort it out themselves unless something comes up.
Mina smirked when she realized Midoriya was there. Iwasaki had been so fun to tease, so it begged the question if that had been an act, or if he was actually so easily flustered. Yaomomo has his attention. I wonder if I could…
Yaoyorozu had been the first to greet Izuku, and she and Shinso had pulled his attention to their conversation after realizing he was there. Carefully and slowly, like a cat creeping up on its prey, Ashido slinked her way across the common area before pouncing onto Iwa- Midoriya's back.
"Hey there, Midori. It's good to see you're back." Midoriya had flinched slightly when she landed across his shoulders, but there was none of the immediate freaking out like she had seen the previous day. Well, I guess he is a different person now, kind of literally. He wouldn't act the same.
"Hello, Ashido. As I was telling these two, I'm about to head to bed, so if you're wanting me to join in your gaming, I'll have to decline."
"Nah, figured you'd be tired after that showing, though you're always welcome to take me with you." Mina leaned into Midoriya's ear and lowered her tone as she tried to provoke a response from the green boy.
Mina wasn't ready, however, when his body rumbled lowly from barely contained laughter. Nor was she mentally prepared when he set her down, leaned into her ear, and purred his next words. "Oh, darling. My door's always open." Ashido couldn't help the violet flush that bloomed across her skin, nor could she help hiding her face in her hands as he laughed while walking up the stairs. No, no he wasn't the same person at all.